Turkish opposition’s former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is facing charges of rejecting the PKK/YPG as a terrorist group and extolling its bloody campaign to “save its homeland” in remarks he made in 2014.
The ex-chair of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) will stand trial on Dec. 3, local media reported Thursday.
According to an indictment released by the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in the capital Ankara on Wednesday, Kılıçdaroğlu is accused of sequentially “praising the crime and the criminal” in an investigation launched upon a February 2020 criminal complaint from three Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) lawmakers.
MHP members Feti Yıldız, İzzet Ulvi Yönter and Ismail Faruk Aksu’s letter accused Kılıçdaroğlu of lauding Selahattin Demirtaş, the former leader of the now-defunct Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is formally known as the Green Left Party (YSP) and informally as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party).
Demirtaş has been in prison since 2016 for spreading terrorist propaganda and having ties to the PKK. He retired from active politics in June 2023. He and other HDP officials have been accused of calling for riots in October 2014 amid a Daesh siege on the PKK's Syrian affiliate, the YPG, on Ain al-Arab – or Kobani.
In the events that would become known as the Oct. 6-7 Kobani protests, 37 people were killed and some 761 others were injured in clashes between pro-PKK and conservative Kurdish groups and security forces throughout Türkiye, especially in the southeast.
During a chat with students at the Istanbul University weeks after the Kobani riots, Kılıçdaroğlu said the YPG was “not a terrorist group for us.”
“The YPG is a formation mobilized to save its homeland,” he said.
MHP lawmakers argued that Kılıçdaroğlu “clearly declared he views the YPG as liberation and independence fighters.”
Their letter also included Kılıçdaroğlu’s similar remarks and social media posts between 2016 and 2019 praising members of the PKK and the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), which organized a deadly coup attempt in July 2016.
Kılıçdaroğlu’s lawyer Celal Çelik in his defense argued the remarks were “political assessments made in line with personal views” and requested the case be dismissed.
The prosecution, however, said Kılıçdaroğlu’s remarks were applicable for disrupting public order and constituted the conditions that could pose a plain and tangible threat to society.
During Kılıçdaroğlu’s reign, the CHP had close ties with the HDP, even securing its endorsement for Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu during the 2019 local elections.
Kılıçdaroğlu himself visited Demirtaş earlier in May this year in the Edirne prison complex, after which he said he disapproved of the ex-HDP leader’s imprisonment and said his release would “pave the way for civilian politics and end terror events.”
